by E. E. Knight
"I guess one more ex-Quisling won't hurt. And I don't know how Glass's attitude can get much worse."
The men whistled and hooted and tossed scraps to the dog.
Chapter Twelve
The Banks of the Green River, September: The fortunes of javelin are at their lowest ebb. Help from the legworm ranchers has all but dried up. Only the underground dares to make contact, informing Southern Commands forces where they've hidden supplies.
The trickle of foodstuffs, plus the usual resourcefulness of soldiers to find food even on the march, allows Javelin to stay together in body.
Its soul is another matter.
The Moondaggers have stepped up their harassment. They shift south and west faster than the brigade can move, herding the column north when it wants to go south.
It's too dangerous to send out patrols. Only the Wolves and Cats leave the column. Even Valentines company keeps close, scavenging such towns and camps as they temporarily occupy. Even Vette, who grew up in Kentucky, was lost near Campbellsville.
The men are bearded, dirty, tired. Their rope may not have run out yet, but the tattered end is in view. Much of their artillery marks the line of retreat along the Cumberland Parkway, destroyed and abandoned as ammunition ran out. Wounded, sick, and injured are either hidden with the underground or carried along. The engineers, with their usual flair for improvisation, have rigged the leg worms with yolks that allow them to carry wounded swinging from hammocks, a smoother ride for the injured than the ambulance trucks.
They're far from home, far from sound, and far from those dreams of becoming ranchers and whiskey barons. It's all they can do to keep moving, keep securing bridges and hill gaps, and keep the rear guard supplied in its endless leapfrogs while delaying the Moondaggers behind and at the flanks.
* * * *
The Moondaggers may have begun the campaign as little more than a well-organized mob of killers, but they learned quickly under hard lessons.
Either that, or more experienced formations and commanders were sent to reinforce the division harrying Javelin. It seemed each day they grew more and more aggressive, bringing their route of march closer and closer to the brigade, sending small units to harass the flanks and rear.
The ranchers remained quiescent all around. If anything, it became harder to beg food from the brands. They either fled the brigade's approach or were found to be garrisoned by the Moondaggers. Scouts and the Cats heard a good deal of complaining about the Moondaggers helping themselves to supplies and paying with New Universal Church Guidons personally blessed by the Archon of Detroit. Or long harangues from missionaries asking for warriors willing to fight in the Gods' Holy Struggle.
"Holy Struggle to keep from taking him for a drag behind my worm," Duvalier reported an outrider from the Gunslinger clan grumbling. "He started talking about how my wife could be thrice blessed by faith, submission, and pregnancy."
They fought three skirmishes, and each time were forced to retreat by the Moondaggers bringing up reinforcements by truck. They dug in triple lines of entrenchments on good ground to move a little more north, until their line of march was north-northwest. The roads they needed to take came under long-range artillery fire, and the bridges and fords they wanted to use were mined or destroyed.
Then came the day when the scouts returned from the outskirts of Bowling Green with a special one-sheet newspaper speaking of a pitched battle in Pennsylvania. "Wreckers" (Kurian propagandists were growing tired of the word "terrorist"; with years of use it was losing its punch, so they were increasingly substituting "wreckers" when they discussed the Cause) out of New England had been soundly beaten. Over a thousand captured and the rest scattered in a panicked flight north. It was dreadfully specific in its maps and photographs.
"I don't suppose any of your old Church buddies are in these pictures," Valentine said to Brother Mark.
They went on emergency short rations that day. The legworm clans had stuck a wetted finger in the air and knew which way the wind was blowing. Even the Bulletproof began to suffer desertions. What was worse, sometimes they took their worms with them.
Valentine's company became a productive set of food thieves. They learned to filch from the edges of far fields, creeping in and digging up carrots and sweet potatoes and wrenching off a husk of corn here and there.
* * * *
Valentine sat in the headquarters tent, eyes closed, listening to a news broadcast from Louisville. They were interviewing an author who'd just completed a new study on drug use among youth in the old United States. The main news had to do with a record harvest in the Dakotas, where farmers had overfulfilled their goals by sixteen percent. Locally all they reported was the opening of a new facility for freeze-drying legworm quarters.
He'd started listening because one of communications techs reported hearing a blurb that train service between Nashville, Louisville, Lexington, and Knoxville had been suspended due to flooding. Militia units were being called up and deployed to save communities from the rising floodwaters.
The fall weather had been the one thing that had been kind to the brigade in their trip across Kentucky. Such an obvious lie gave Valentine hope that the legworm riders were attacking the lines.
They hadn't repeated the announcement.
Then Duvalier was tapping him on the shoulder.
"You know your plan to have the legworm ranchers fight the Moondaggers?"
"It's more of a hope than a plan," Valentine admitted.
"Well, maybe the Kurians are waiting for the same thing to happen to us. Or their generals, high Church people, whatever. A lot of them believe their own propaganda. They probably think we're stealing everything that isn't nailed down on this march. When we're not doing that, we're chopping down trees so we can stomp the baby worms."
"How did you come by this?"
"I sat in on a Church question night. Ever been to one of those?"
"I don't think so."
"They're pretty interesting. You write down questions and a priest picks them out of a box and answers them."
"That's a foolproof system," Valentine said.
"The questions smacked of being preselected. Right after a question about our column was another one asking what was being done about it. You haven't killed a bunch of Strongbows, did you?"
"No. We've been out of their territory for days. I don't think we even talked to any."
"Well, the Church is blaming it on you. Also some kidnappings in Glasgow."
"We never even saw the town. The Moondaggers had it occupied before we even got there. The kidnappings—they wouldn't be young women, by any chance?"
"Yes. They're kinda worked up about it."
Worked up. What would it take to push them beyond worked up?
He got an idea. An ugly, hurtful idea.
Are you a doer or a shirker, Valentine? What's the price of your honor? Is it worth more than the survival of your comrades?
Within an hour he was where the medical staff had un-hammocked the patients and unburdened their worms.
Valentine looked at the three fresh bodies, good Southern Command men who'd traded in all their tomorrows for the Cause, hating himself. They gave up their lives for their comrades in the brigade. Would they object to their bodies being of further use?
"Doctor, I'm afraid I’ll have to ask you for the use of three bodies."
"What do you have in mind, Major?"
"Nothing you want to know about, Doctor. They'll be treated respectfully, don't worry."
* * * *
The Moondagger patrol never had a chance.
Reports from the legworm liaison said they were being supplied by the Green River clan.
Valentine chose the spot for the ambush well. He used legworm pasture along the most open stretch of road he could find, just east of a crossroads where other patrols might see and investigate smoke from three directions. A collapsed barn and an intact aluminum chicken coop stood opposite his position, off the road by about f
ifty yards.
His company, armed with the weapons meant for trade, backed up by Glass' pair with their machine guns, lay under piles of brush taken from legworm deposits, using the tiny hummocks of the snakelike legworm trails to rest their rifles.
With one squad left guarding his escape and evasion trail, he set up three parallel kill zones, anchoring their flanks with the .50s.
Once the men were in position, barrels down and hidden, he and Rand hurried around, laying brush across the groups of prone men.
The three-truck, one-car patrol was heading east, which struck him as strange. Better for him. They were coming off the rise six miles to the southeast, a good place to observe a long stretch of the Green River Valley.
They had a single antiaircraft cannon as armament mounted in the bed of a heavy-duty pickup. Just behind the cannon truck, the rest oi: the men rode in the beds of the armored double-axel trucks. Old mattresses and spare tires hung from aluminum skirting as improvised armor.
Valentine waited to detonate the mine until the cannon truck was over the old soda can that served as a marker. The mine, simple TNT under gravel in the potholed road, luckily went off right under one of the wheels and sprang the truck onto its side.
His men held their fire while the other vehicles turned off the road, facing the buildings at an angle. As the men dismounted to the side facing Valentine's line, he gave the order to fire.
"Antenna!" Valentine shouted.
The platoon fired on the command car. Valentine saw blood splatter the windows as the glass cracked and fell.
The .50 calibers completed the execution begun by rifle fire. The Grogs employed their guns like tripod-mounted rifles, firing single, precise shots, sniping over open sights.
Valentine went forward with his machine pistol, leading a maneuver team with Patel offering support fire. A shielded machine gun sprang up from the bed of the foremost of the trucks, almost like a jack-in-the-box as it unfolded, the gunner cocking it smoothly. Valentine fell sideways, shooting as he fell. The gunner made the mistake of swinging his weapon to shoot back, exposing himself to the riflemen.
Valentine watched invisible hands tug at the gunner's clothes and the gunner went down, shooting in the air as he fell. Through the gap under the truck Valentine saw two figures running for the old, half-collapsed barn. He took careful aim and planted bursts in one back and then the other.
The firing died down to single shots as the platoons made sure from a distance that the enemy was down. Valentine waved Rutherford and DuSable forward. They put their autoloading shotguns to their shoulders and stepped out. They took turns covering each other as they checked the cabins of the vehicles.
Valentine heard a shotgun blast, turned around.
"Thought he moved," DuSable explained.
"This one's wounded bad," Rutherford said.
Valentine nodded. He had to finish the job. They couldn't leave wounded behind who could tell stories.
Rutherford said, "Sorry, bro," and fired.
"Give up, give up," another bearded man shouted, holding his hands up as DuSable approached him.
DuSable ordered him to the ground. "Take him prisoner," Valentine said.
He had a sort of a long scarf about his neck. Valentine thought he might have been in the gun truck. He looked dazed but could walk. He wouldn't slow them up. Headquarters could figure out what to do with him.
"We're clear to this end, sir," Rutherford called, firing one more blast at a wet coughing sound.
"The easy part's over," Valentine said.
"I admire your definition of hard, sir," DuSable said, reloading his shotgun.
While scouts watched the road, the men worked in pairs, loading bodies into one truck. Then they backed it into the barn.
Valentine nodded to Patel. They both drew their knives and went to work.
Meanwhile Glass brought forward the dead bodies they had taken out of camp, now clad in legworm leather vests and soft boots such as the locals favored, and had the Grogs dig shallow graves for them near the road. They had assorted hooks and chains looped or stuffed in their pockets.
They hung some of the Moondagger bodies upside down from the rafters and cut their throats, letting the last of the blood run onto the barn floor. Then Valentine started cutting off beards.
He'd mutilated bodies before for effect in Santo Domingo. Then he'd only been risking his soul.
From what he understood of the Moondaggers, their retribution would be swift and merciless.
Valentine could picture the local reprisals easily enough. Moytana's description of their tactics had plenty of historical precedent. People herded into old church buildings and burned. Executions against town square walls worthy of Goya.
Who bore the responsibility? The agent provocateur or the troops? The Moondaggers would claim that if there had been no attack, there would be no reprisal.
Valentine took off another beard. Easier than skinning rabbits. No legs to deal with, just a long circular cut of the knife from one corner of the mouth, down the throat, and then back up to the other corner of the mouth. The bodies were still warm and he could smell their dried sweat. The cloying aroma of death wouldn't begin to rise for some hours yet.
For now they smelled like blood and diapers.
Rand was at the door of the barn, blocking the daylight coming through the gap between the truck and the post. "Sir, there's a radio in the command car that's still working."
Valentine stepped over to another body. "Put Preville on it. Have him listen to chatter and see if they know about the ambush."
Rand kept his eyes well above Valentine's waistline and the flashing knife.
"Will do, sir." Mercifully, he left without saying anything more.
Valentine's sense of honor wasn't taken word for word from the Southern Command Officers Epitome. It was instead like a jigsaw collage from three or for different puzzles, all half-formed but recognizable pictures. Some came from his parents, others from Father Max, more from his training, a few from his experiences in the Kurian Zone.
Of course he'd done despicable things in the past. He'd bled men who had no more of a chance of fighting back than bound pigs, Twisted Cross lying in their tanks in a basement in Omaha. He'd tortured. He'd acted as judge, jury, and executioner over Mary Carlson's killers. He'd helped the overlord Kurian in Seattle wipe out Adler and his staff.
Each time one bit of his conscience or another had plucked at him, he'd burned with regret later thinking back on what he'd done, but necessity compelled and partially excused him.
But this time all of the jigsaw pieces agreed. This setup of the Green River clan stripped him of whatever scarecrow of his honor had remained.
He'd decided that the brigade's survival required a sacrifice. Of his honor. More important, of some members of the Green River clan. Wide-eyed children would be fed into war's furnace as a result of a ploy that couldn't even promise victory.
Or was it really for the brigade? Do you need to be proven right this badly, David Stuart Valentine? Tip over the first domino in what you hope will be a series of massacres followed by ambush followed by another massacre, until these beautiful green hills run with blood?
He'd have to shave with his eyes shut from now on.
"Maybe they were right about that shit detail stuff," a woman outside the barn said. Valentine made an effort not to place the voice to a face.
"I think I've gone crazy, Patel."
His sergeant major tossed a length of strong nylon binding cord over a still-sound rafter and hoisted a corpse by its ankles. Rigor was just beginning to set in.
"You remember Lugger, from LeHavre's old company?" Yes.
Patel fixed the other end of the line to the bare-beam wall. "She was on the Kansas operation. She saw what the Moondaggers did there— entire towns herded out into athletic fields and machine-gunned. She was on a scout and came into one of those ghost towns after. Saw Kurian cameras viding the bodies as guys posing as Southern Command
POWs confessed to the killings. Sometimes they took out towns that weren't even in the fight—just did it to make a point."
"And?"
"These guys earned their killing. This," he said, looping a running hitch around another set of ankles, "is just interest on their deposit."
"What about the Green River Clan?"
"David, worrying now will not alter the future. We must wait and see what happens."
Red Dog took the opportunity to relieve himself on a Moondagger tire.
Patel added, "The Moondaggers might wonder about a couple of large-caliber holes in their trucks and where a gang of legworm ranchers got a wireless detonator. Maybe we'll get lucky and they will see through this charade. They might stop dancing around, herding us, and try to settle things in one fight. I would very much like to see these bastards attack into overlapping fields of fire and proper artillery spotting."
"I don't think we'd win that," Valentine said.
"Perhaps not. But it would make a lot of people in Kansas feel better, knowing how many we took with us."
Valentine liked the picture Patel was painting. He wiped his knife on a Moondager uniform and sawed off another beard.
"I wonder if they have the heart for it," Patel continued, hoisting the next body. "Despite all their shrieks and prayers and bluster. Like most bullies, they are at their most bloodthirsty when striking the defenseless. And do not forget, the legworm clans around here know how to fight and will not be as easily herded as populations brought up at the Kurian teat—"
"Major," a corporal called, not even poking his head inside the barn. "Preville's got some com traffic he wants you to listen to."
"Patel, can you finish up here?" That's it, make it sound like a bit of carpentry.
"Yes, sir."
Valentine left the half-collapsed abattoir gladly. The revolutionary's morality clung to his back, a heavier burden than any he'd ever carried while training with the Wolves.
The command car smelled like stale cigar smoke and blood. It had a side that opened up, rather like the hot-dog trucks Valentine had seen in Chicago, turning the paneling of the vehicle into a table and a sheltering overhang where the radio operator could sit out of the rain.
